In today's digitized world, media is being amassed at a nearly exponential pace, as an ever-increasing number of portable communications and media devices empower individuals and organizations to capture life's most precious moments at every turn. Media creation is now easier than ever before, and because of this, the amount of media being collected is now so overwhelming that filtering a highlight account of an event or story without considerable manual effort is untenable. As media collections continue to grow, so does the effort that must be made to keep up with conceptualizing these collections to filter highlight accounts.
Devices with Internet and mobile telephony capability such as cell and satellite phones, personal computers, tablets or other computing devices, and digital picture, audio & video recording devices enable Users to create media in high-quality formats with ease. These same devices also enable Users to quickly accumulate large libraries of media files, as media becomes increasingly easy to create.
This ease of media creation also presents the opportunity to create a large number of media files and large media files in a very short period of time. For example, an individual can capture multiple pictures in split-second intervals—while also at the same time capturing video—guaranteeing that no sound or visual is missed. These large libraries of media remain on the devices or are often transferred to one or more devices for storage and processing. Many individuals have multiple libraries of media residing on storage drives or computers that are independent and fragmented from other large libraries of media on a User's other storage devices. An individual user can have, for example, several hundred gigabytes of digital photos, video and audio on several devices and multiple computers. In many cases, media in such libraries can take up over half of a single computer's drive storage—and Users often store multiple copies of media archives, ultimately confusing and duplicating media in consolidated archives. Additionally, computers, tablets, cameras and phones rarely survive the lifetime of media, and are not ideal for long-term storage of media files. This leads many Users to frustrating ends as the cataloguing and consolidation of large libraries takes time and rarely results in file structures similar to the original file structure. The situation is compounded by the sheer quantity of media files that are growing and overwhelming to the User and are a barrier to their enjoyment.
Social media and photo sharing sites provide an opportunity to share current digital media, but significantly lack the ability to store complete media archives and organize, distribute or share media from such an archive in a personalized or customized manner. Meanwhile, native media management applications installed on computers often require the most advanced and available hard drive speeds, memory and processing power to function. This often leaves Users with older or lower end computers with few options to process media into display formats.